Post your favorite Unix command!

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

Well, this admittedly excludes you weird WIN32 users. Oh well. This thread should be both interesting and educational if y’all participate.

So, when you’re running around in your Unix shell, what is your favorite command? What command did you find or learn about and say, “Oh. Gosh. I’ve been doing so much more work than I needed…”? Anything you think is fun?

I’ll start. When I realized that I could hit tab excessively and not fill out large threads I became quite happy. So mine is the tab button.

Anyone?

2

My favorite is “shutdown”

3

Quick, everyone try valarking’s!

4

aww, but windoze has that now too

[though you use -s instead of “-h now”… no matter]

I personally like the man command

5

i use the HALT one a lot :stuck_out_tongue:

Alltaken

6

z3r0 d:
But why would I want to shut down a perfectly working Windows machine?

7

ok I guess my fav UNIX command would have to be tab as well…I love not having to type all those .43..so.3.xpu.4-5-2.u.no.lib.b.n filenames (whose idea was that anyhow?)

back at my old job my fav was kill …used to kill off other users’ terminals when they screwed up or when i just needed to talk to them about something (hey wanna go out for a drink after work…um i mean heres your employee evaluation…)

Off topic a bit…(off topic in an off topic post?) …my absolute fav command on my current box has to be emerge …i love it i love it i love it (kicking in the air) I know its not a UNIX command but damnit I just like it a lot.

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Tab works in Windows environments as well.

the console in WinXP understands Tabs

Alltaken

9

mv / /dev/null

Stefano

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cd /etc
ex inittab
s/id:5:initdefault:/id:6:initdefault:/
quit
shutdown -r now

Cheers,

b01c

11

cd /home/josh

12

Mine is “df”

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how about 40, remotely…

FOR /L %N IN (40,-1,1) DO SHUTDOWN -S -M \\COMPUTER%N

now then, pstree [in linux] is nice too

14

how about delall

15

For when I have amnesia,

whoami
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Another great one is

“linux” :smiley: (boots the kernel!)

A few of my other favorites
gcc
make && make install
su (especailly this one! :smiley: )
ls, cd, man, more

17

I hate Unix.

Unix is the :<.

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For worse amnesia use:

which whoami
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But without unix, Mac OS X wouldn’t exist. Isn’t that what you use? It gives control where the GUI fails.

Anyway, I use sudo rm, cp /dev/null, sudo kill -9 (for apps that just won’t DIE). I do like that tab though. If I press tab tab at an empty command line, I get a list of all 1237 availble commands.

./configure and ./make are good too.

I like the emacs games. In the terminal type emacs and hit return. Do esc then x then type any of the following: pong, doctor, snake, hanoi. There are a whole load of classic games in /usr/share/emacs/21.2/lisp/play - note the version number (21.2) may differ.

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I have a PC.